Batman, Spider-man, Superman: with their capes, japes and frivolity, these superheroes are all so pre-Lehmans. Which is why I'm introducing a new action character for these recessionary times, one with special powers to restore even the most shrivelled economy to full health. Ladies and Gents, let me present WEALTH-CREATOR™.

From the Planet Rand, WEALTH-CREATOR™ comes armed with special powers of Dynamism and Growth. His sole weakness is high marginal tax rates, which can repel him all the way to Zurich (Zurich, I tell you!). But he's our last defence against the villain Burokrat, whose evil scheme is to cover the whole world with sticky red tape. WEALTH-CREATOR™ even has his own sound effect: Dosh!

Do I exaggerate? Sadly, not as much as I'd like. Just ask Nick Clegg, slapped down last week by his Conservative coalition partners for daring to suggest that the super-rich pay more tax. Cabinet colleague George Osborne: "We have to be careful as a country we don't drive away the wealth creators ... that are going to lead our economic recovery." Senior Tory backbencher Bernard Jenkin: "We've seen a lot of hedge funds moving abroad because of the tax system ... We've got to be very careful we don't strangle the goose that lays the golden egg." And you thought I was joking about Zurich.

I don't particularly wish to defend Clegg's wealth-levy proposals, largely because he doesn't seem to have any. If the LibDems really do want more tax from those who can best afford to pay it, an easy and logical thing to do would be to revalue the property values used to set council tax (untouched in England since 1991) and add more bands for the priciest houses. Let's see Vince Cable, sometime subversive and full-time MP for monied Twickenham, call for that.

What's grating is the Tory comeback: their designation of those with money as heroic individuals who not only created their own wealth but will generate jobs and money for the rest of us. The British right aren't alone in doing this: last week's Republican convention in Florida was practically dedicated to attacking a perfectly reasonable observation by Obama that individual prosperity always rests on others – from families and teachers to roads and bridges and public works. No delegate's speech was complete without a preamble about how "we built it" – "it" being their own prosperity. Five years after the wealth creators in finance drove the economy into a crisis that still drags on, the old cant is back: what's good for the rich is good for the rest of us.

Yet the elite's main ability is in making money for themselves. Just look at Mitt Romney, whose claim to the presidency is that he is part of this blessed group of wealth creators.

Before moving into politics, Romney's game was private equity: buying up companies, loading them up with debt and stripping out their workers and costs, then selling them. It may have been rough and it may been bloody, but the Republican knows how to run a business and therefore how to steer an economy. Except that a study by the Wall Street Journal found that of 77 firms Romney's private equity firm Bain Capital invested in between 1984 and 1999 when he ran the company, 22% ended up filing for bankruptcy protection or shut up shop (although some ran into trouble after Bain was no longer involved and others recovered following reorganisation). Another 8% came to so much grief that Bain lost all its money. The bulk of its returns came from a handful of lucky bets.

The wealth creators' record in Britain isn't much better. Totting up how firms in the FTSE-100 share index performed between 1983 and 2002, Manchester Business School's Ismail Erturk and others calculated that Britain's biggest businesses saw a 2.7% rise in sales each year over the two decades – very roughly in line with the growth of the economy. Not bad, but hardly spectacular. What was impressive was how pay for FTSE company directors rose: 26.2% a year above inflation, each year. These aren't wealth creators at all; they're wealth extractors, shaking down their businesses or investments for money, without even risking much of their own cash. Some do well, most do badly: thanks to the glory of their fee structures and remuneration committees, all get paid. When Romney claims the title of wealth creator, he's pretending that he – a multimillionaire speculator – has anything in common with the "mining, manufacturing, service businesses" that he's hoping will back him. What's surprising isn't the tactic; it's that he still gets away with it.

Despite the Republicans' claims, what money the wealthy do make often relies on public investment. The University of Massachusetts economist William Lazonick describes the US as "the most developmental state in world history" on account of its government support for industry. He reels off the schemes either subsidised or substantially supported by the government: "Railways, higher education, agricultural innovation, highways, semi-conductors, computers, aeronautics research, the internet, nano-technology, green energy". In each case, he points out, what the public supported, the private sector cashed in on.

The doctrine of the 80s, according to the late John Kenneth Galbraith, was that "the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had too much". One needed tax cuts to make them more productive, the other required benefit cuts. All this talk of the importance of wealth creators tells you that that doctrine didn't pass with Thatcher and Reagan: it still governs us today.